Regarding the study, I think it’s plausible in a sense that they have a large, diverse sample and control for the things that you should control for but what I always miss in medical papers is a more sophisticated quantitative part. It might be somewhere where I just didn’t see it because I’m not from the field but I don’t really understand their mathematical model that has led to these findings, nor do I understand how to interpret these findings independently.

[–] SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 5 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

All that is carefully explained in the methods section. 3 pages long.

One criticism is that the comparison sets of data are not balanced, they compared 1.6M meat eaters with barely 75000 vegetarians and vegans.

Regardless, there have been many studies with similar conclusions which can be compared with meta analysis.

Vegetarians have a much more active digestion allowing shorter exposure to carcinogenic products found by digesting meat and they have a completely different gut flora. On autopsy, you can always tell a vegetarian because their adipose tissue is pure white, not dark. The also have a lower BMI. But this is just cancer, there is literally no disease that is not reduced with vegetarian diets.

[–] Peehole@piefed.social 1 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

I’m sorry but it’s not. They are running a regression model. You don’t need to show me that you can write down the equation but it is common to at least show something like ANOVA or just in general a table that shows your model and the coefficient estimates. It might be buried somewhere because the tables aren’t rendered next to the text but I couldn’t find it.

I‘m not sure why we call this community science if I have to explain why I would like to see the mathematical model that justifies the core result of a paper.

[–] galaxy_nova@lemmy.world 2 points 16 hours ago

An unfortunate issue with Lemmy. Seems to generally skew tech which makes sense but there isn’t as much scientific literacy necessarily.

[–] porcoesphino@mander.xyz -4 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

I went to upvote for the link but I'm pretty luke warm on the rest of the comment so didn't.

[–] Peehole@piefed.social 1 points 17 hours ago

Care to elaborate? Upvotes / downvotes are meaningless but if you have objections to the way I see it I might learn something and I mean that.